Of course, the deductions that we make are biased, coloured by our experience of the various elements found in the situation. They are, after all, our perception of reality—a judgement made by the various faculties of our body. But so is the case with our intellect, reason and all the other deductive activity of the ‘conscious’ mind. These are also based on our own perception of what goes on around us. So, in fact, there is no objective reality. Emotions and intellect are both biased.
Emotions and intellect have their distinct roles in ensuring human survival and evolution, yet they are far from being divorced from each other. Both emotions and intellect are functions of our mental faculty. It is our brain that triggers feelings of pleasure and pain, falsifying the popular adage ‘Think from the head, not the heart!’ When we are equipped with intellect as well as emotional bandwidth, we can fully explore the human experience.
Just as we develop our intellectual capabilities, our emotional well-being also lies in allowing our body to explore the freedom to grasp clues from the environment to deduce how we truly feel. Do we permit ourselves to freely scan a situation and tell our brain how we really feel? Or are we trapped within our own biases? Are we limited by societal norms about feelings we must not acknowledge? While there is societal legitimacy in most places in the world for developing our intellectual capabilities, there are varying proportions of significance given by different societies to our emotional health.
In contemporary India we are often told to be wary of our softer emotions. If in love, we must deny it. If we are passionate, we must be ‘sensible’ and overcome it. If distressed or clinically depressed, we should not acknowledge it. It is common for a married man to be perceived as not manly enough if he is publicly devoted to his wife. Homosexuality is a contentious legal issue. Even a public display of heterosexual affection is socially taboo. We are hard on ourselves.
I have wondered if we hold a peculiar negative bias against the feeling and expression of love towards one another in India. Is love popular in the fantasy world we create in our cinema precisely because in our real world it is a threat? We fantasize about love in ‘reel life’ perhaps because we do not permit ourselves to experience it in reality. In our movies, a man can fight all societal pressures and court his woman incessantly until love wins against society, which is a dream for many in the audience. This popular storyline, as well as the unrealistic storytelling form of our movies, in which we break into song and dance at the slightest pretext, are both fantasy. In reality, neither do we in contemporary India break into a jig just like that, nor do we fight for love. In many societies, popular cinema is a mirror of reality, but that is not the case in ours. Instead, it seems to me that with over one billion of us scrambling for scant resources, we are prone to considering love—an emotion that it is as physiologically important and necessary to develop as our mental faculties of reason and intellect—as an unnecessary encumbrance at best.
On the banks of the river Ganga in Benares, in December 1952, Jiddu Krishnamurti—perhaps India’s greatest contemporary philosopher—spoke to boys and girls aged between nine and twenty. His ninth address to them began with these words, ‘You remember, yesterday morning we were discussing the complex problem of love? I do not think we shall understand it until we understand an equally complex problem which we call the mind.’1
He asked the children, ‘Why do we have to have love? Why should there be love? Can we do without it? What would happen if you did not have this so-called love?’
Indeed, why do we love? The question has intrigued philosophers, scientists, poets, historians and lovers all over the world, across all eras. The amount of attention given to this powerful emotion is befitting because it has so many variations—love between friends and family, the bond of love forged by soldiers who fight side by side in a war, flirtation, love for one’s own self, a larger love for humanity, sexual passion and desire. It can be blind, one-sided, unreciprocated, misguided or unconditional. Love can be long-lasting, with commitment, goodwill and understanding, or fickle if passion and lust die early. It is a matter of popular debate whether only a long-lasting romantic relationship is considered love, whether all other forms of giving and receiving love are not ‘love’. If one loves and lets it go, is it not really love? Without the commitment, is it mere infatuation? Without the passion, is it just dedication?
From an evolutionary perspective, all variations of love—short-lived or not—are a survival tool for our species. In any relationship involving love, individuals learn and grow from the experience. What love is depends on where we are in relation to it. In some instances, love might torment us or even emotionally destroy us for a while, but from this experience too, we learn about ourselves and about the other person. In that state, we desperately draw strength from all resources to survive, and grow as a person.
Love in all its delightful forms is an evolutionary mechanism to promote social relationships, support and feelings of safety and security. Whether long-lasting or short-lived, love provides an anchor. Even when love breaks, it leaves behind many lessons about managing the self in relation to others. There can be no mistakes in love, nothing right or wrong, as every instance of it leads to a greater understanding of humankind. There is therefore no reason to be fearful about love as there are only lessons of personal and collective growth and evolution to
